Morris Chang was at Texas Instruments and saw the rising cost of fabs, and need to keep them full. And he saw that Taiwan was in trouble with unemployment. So he created the foundry industry from that vision, as I remember, getting Taiwan government help while helping them evolve as high tech manufacturing leader. Would love to see a book about his life...someone, please, he impacted the electronics industry more than people realize, in my opinion.

Motorola and Texas Instruments, for example, started using TSMC for about half of their wafer production, high volume items, and were shocked at the fast improvment rate in yields, and good cooperation on design-process integration.

Capital equipment vendors realized that they had to get their newest stuff into TSMC early, and gave them onsite support. Morris Chang saw the trends and changed the rules....

My intention was to cover shakers and movers in 2013 (with one look forward to 2014 in the case of Morris Chang).

I could argue that as a systems company Apple is slightly tangential to my main focus of interest but in any case Steve Jobs went on medical leave in January 2011 and passed away in November 2011. Tim Cook took over as CEO in August 2011.

Its a good practice to change the guards when the industry is in a good shape so that the new executive has time to settle down and prepare for the next downturn. Most of the executives in this article seem to leave on their own and with a good feeling. Are there any oust that happen in recent years?